In “A Rose For Emily” by William Faulkner, the rose symbolizes the town’s respect for Emily, and discloses the irony of Emily never receiving a rose from Homer. At the beginning of the story Faulkner talks about the death of Emily. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral”(). “...respectful affection for a fallen monument”(). Emily has, metaphorically, always been in the town and symbolizes the past for her town. Since the town respects their elders, they feel like it is their duty to honor Emily after she passes away. She separated herself and was excluded from the town, though when she passed, everyone came to her funeral instead of letting her fade into the past. Homer publically let people know that “He liked men” …show more content…
The grandmother talks about the difference between raising children in America than in China. “In America, parents not supposed to spank the child.” The grandma thinks Americans do not punish their children enough if they are bad, whereas Americans believe the Chinese are too harsh. The grandmother does not approve of Natalie raising her granddaughter, Sophie to be wild and uncontrollable. grandma thinks that Natalie should raise her children the way she was raised. After the grandma was caught hurting her granddaughter, Natalie forces her mother to look for apartments so she would stay away from Sophie and not hurt her anymore. “But now my daughter take me around to look at apartments.” Natalie is making her mother move out of her house to prevent her from harming Sophie with her Chinese parenting style. The grandmother feels betrayed by her daughter because children are normally supposed to take care of their parents in China, not the other way around. The conflicting ideas of Chinese and American cultures causes tension to rise between Natalie and her mother throughout the …show more content…
The wallpaper that is in the room where the woman lives is at first is despised by her, but then she begins to feel “...really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper. It dwells in my mind so!” At first the narrator despises the wallpaper, but she changes her mind after she begins to spend a lot of time within the room. This could be compared to her own mind as a result of the narrator wanting her husband to ‘fix’ her, but later on realizing that she does not like the way he is treating her like she should not have a voice about her own life. She is always in the room with the wallpaper, which forces her to be with her own thoughts at all times, so she begins to like or at least get used to it. Towards the end of the story, the narrator begins to understand what the wallpaper is conveying to her. “And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern- it strangles.” This shows that the narrator wants to escape from her overbearing husband but she knows that if she tries to assert control over herself, then he will grasp her even tighter and in the end, ‘strangle’ her. The longer the narrator is in the room, the more unstable she becomes and is able to see a pattern that wasn’t there before develop. Her mind
Either way Miss Emily had an issue of clinginess. For three days after her father’s death, she refused to believe that he was gone. She also kept Homers body for ten years, maybe because she was upset that her father was taken away. Although Emily’s father rejected any man that she brought over, perhaps keeping Homer was a way to get what she always wanted, a man in her life. The reasons behind Emily’s psychological behaviors vary.
Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, which is also her doctor, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness. Everyday she keeps looking at the torn yellow wallpaper. While there, she is forbidden to write in her journal, as it indulges her imagination, which is not in accordance with her husband's wishes. Despite this, the narrator makes entries in the journal whenever she has the opportunity. Through these entries we learn of her obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom. She is enthralled with it and studies the paper for hours. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the pattern in the paper. The story reaches its climax when her husband must force his way into the bedroom, only to find that his wife has pulled the paper off the wall and is crawling around the perimeter of the room.
The audience can visualize how she is slowly seeing herself as an attachment to the room when she keeps referring to seeing a woman figure in the wallpaper and that she needed to get her out. The Narrator is obsessed with the wallpaper to the point of seeing a woman behind it, trapped. Relating to her own entrapment in that room. Also, in terms of the Narrator, she feels so confined to the room that she had to physically tear herself out for her to feel free. In the consequence of her husband telling her that she was better in that upstairs room and to stay there so she could get better from her illness, it did the Narrator more harm than good.
At first, she finds the wallpaper's intricate patterns fascinating, but as her mental state deteriorates, she becomes obsessed with deciphering its hidden meanings and patterns. The oppressive and stifling nature of the wallpaper mirrors the constraints placed upon her by her husband and society. As she becomes increasingly fixated on the wallpaper, it becomes a manifestation of her own internal struggles and conflicts. The gradual unraveling of the wallpaper mirrors the protagonist's descent into madness, culminating in a chilling conclusion where she believes she is the woman trapped behind the pattern. The wallpaper takes on a life of its own in her mind, reflecting her own internal struggles and
The female character argues at first about being in the room, but later the wallpaper begins to take control over her thoughts just like John took control of her every action. She is fixated on the wallpaper though she hates it, letting the wallpaper have dominion over her thoughts and actions. Seemingly, she is like a woman who is being held captive and wants to be released on her own terms. However, her lack of control does not last long. Towards the end of the story, the female character says that “Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.
She becomes obsessed with the pattern, trying to trace it with her eyes, but in her intense study of the paper she finds that “There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.” What she sees in the wallpaper becomes her secret, something that she can keep from her husband, and without his controlling influence, she is able to find an escape within the wallpaper. Now she no longer sleeps at night because she lies awake and studies the wallpaper’s pattern, what was once an ugly piece of “paper” now, metaphorically becomes her
The main symbolism running throughout A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, is the theme of how important it is to let go of the past. Miss Emily clings to the past and does not want to be independent. The Old South is becoming the new South and she cannot move forward. The residents of the South did not all give in to change just because they lost the Civil War. In A Rose for Emily time marches on leaving Miss Emily behind as she stubbornly refuses to progress into a new era. In the story, symbolism is used to give more details than the author actually gives to the reader. Symbolism helps to indicate how Emily was once innocent but later changes, how her hair, house, and lifestyle, helped to show her resistance to change. The story is not
Women are all around treated differently than men, and especially in this time period. Emily was an older woman that had never been without a dominant, male figure in her life. Her father and the ex love of her life had always been there for her. This is when Homer Barron came into her life and she realized that she never wanted to lose him. Even though Emily was eventually with Homer, that did not mean she was lower in the social class because she was with a laborman.
Lindo gives up the vision that she has of her daughter and what she can teach her. Lindo has the idea that she can teach Waverly “American circumstances and Chinese character.” She wants Waverly to take advantage of being in America but still respect her mom and have the Chinese morals that she grew up with. But Lindo questions her vision when she asks herself “How could I know these two things do not mix?” Lindo continues to feel the hurt of losing this when she sees how much her daughter has changed and moved away from the Chinese girl that Lindo envisioned.
In the novel, The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator and her husband move into a marvelous house. The narrator suffers from depression and is ordered by her husband to get plenty of rest and is not allowed to work and write. Despite her husband’s orders, the narrator begins to write in her secret journal. In her journal, the narrator describes the house. At first, her descriptions of the house where positive with minor disturbances like the bars on the window and the “rings and things” in the walls, but is then specifically disturbed by the yellow wallpaper in the room. Because she was not allowed to write, the narrator becomes good at hiding her journal. Weeks pass and the narrator becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper. She fantasizes and begins to see images in the wallpaper. For example, “two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down”, and is later convinced that there is a woman trapped behind the wallpaper. In her writings, the narrator mentions that she would see the woman trying to break free by shaking the bars at night and roaming around the wallpaper in the day. On her last day in the house, the narrator decides to lock herself in the room and peel of the wallpaper from the walls in order to set the woman free. When her husband breaks into the locked room, he is horrified by what he has seen. The narrator creeps around the room, “I’ve got out at last in spite of you and Jane”, the narrator said. Her husband faints, yet she continues to creep around the room non-stop
A Rose for Emily was written by William Faulkner, the story was written to show how the South has evolved, furthermore it is about a woman named Emily who refuses to accept change, as change is happening all around her. Emily is stuck in her ways and she functions as a symbol of the Old South as the town around her becomes more civilized and developed.
The mood of the story shifted from nervous, anxious, hesitant even, to tense and secretive, and shifts again to paranoid and determination. Her anxiousness is evident whenever she talks to John. She always seems to think for lengthy time when attempting to express her concerns about her condition to him. The mood shift from anxious to secretive is clear when she writes “I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper.” (9). She wants no one to figure out the affect the wallpaper has on her and she wants to be the only one to figure out its pattern. The final mood shift to determination is obvious when she writes “But I am here, and no person must touch this paper but me – not ALIVE!” (11). She is steadfast in attempting to free the woman from the wallpaper. She even goes as far as to lock herself in the room to make sure that she is not interrupted. The major conflicts of this story are the narrator versus John over the nature of her illness and its treatment and the narrator’s internal struggle to express herself and claim independence. During the entire story her and John’s views about her treatment conflict with each other, especially when it comes to her writing. He even makes her stay in the room upstairs instead of in a prettier room downstairs that she would prefer. She often keeps her views to herself or writes them down in
Another important character from the story is Homer Barron, a man who develops an interest in Miss Emily, “Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable” (519). According to the story, it seems that the whole town was thinking they would get married: “She will marry him” “She will persuade him yet” (520). However, Miss Emily ends up killing Homer by poisoning him. There seems to be two reasons why she did it. One is that she wanted to marry him, but it appears he refused. The other one is that he might be homosexual: “he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elk’s Club, that he was not a marrying man” (520). All these speculations about the principal characters Emily and Homer have one questioning what the narrator’s intention towards them was really. “The narrator wants to trap us in the speculations made about Emily’s and Homer’s characters by making us believe that Emily will kill herself or that Homer is homosexual” (Wallace). He might be right on this statement because this is what one is most likely thinking about through the reading.
One of the mothers, Lindo Jong, was so desperate to cling to her Chinese past that she criticized her daughter Waverly’s relationship with her boyfriend, despite she herself having being forced into an arranged marriage at a young age. As a teenager, Lindo was abandoned by her own family after a flood and left behind to live with her husband-to-be’s strict family. She had no choice in the matter and spent her time planning a way to escape. After she succeeded in fleeing and emigrated to America, she began to raise a family of her own with a husband of her choice. This time, she was able to pick her own husband and ended up being much happier. However, she was unable to let go of her Chinese past and insisted on criticizing Waverly’s boyfriend, Rich. Even though Waverly was with a man who made her happy for the first time in her life, she fretted: “But I worried for Rich. Because I knew my feelings for
However, the main character is confined to the top room, which is labeled as a nursery. This symbolizes the idea that the narrator is indeed being treated as a child and is confined literally and figuratively in her life. The room resembles a jail like setting despite its label as a nursery. She says, “I lie here on this great immoveable bed- it is nailed down, I believe…” (309). Not only is the bed nailed to the floor, but the bars on the window further lead you to believe that she is being trapped inside of this room. Being left in this room all day and night leads the narrator no other option then to ponder her thoughts and lose herself in the wallpaper. She begins to find new patterns in the wallpaper that were not there the day before. The narrator says, “I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman” (311). At the beginning of the story, she only sees lines and patterns that irritate her. By the end of the story, she is finding comfort in the idea that there in a woman who is trapped inside the